At Blazent, our goal is not only to provide our customers with powerful technology, but to display the thinking that goes behind it, with the hopes that they can use this to evolve and accelerate their business. Thus, we are proud to have sponsored some recent innovative research conducted by leading IT analysts firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Last week, Dennis Drogseth, VP of Research at EMA, revealed some of these insights during his webinar titled, “Digital and IT Transformation: A Formula for Empowerment in the Digital Age.”
The research included respondents with titles of ‘Director’ up to C-level executives, providing a comprehensive and unbiased view of ‘transformation,’ a topic that is top of mind for leaders of the business and IT. Some of the unique insights from the webinar:
“Transformation” defined:
Definitions outlined included:
• “Digital transformation” involves optimizing business or organizational effectiveness via digital investments and IT services.
• “IT transformation” is directed at optimizing IT performance in support of business objectives.
There were several questions in the areas of Best Practices, Organization Principles and Process where the results of the output included:
• 79% Linked Their Transformational Initiative to Best Practices or Industry Methodologies (such as ITIL, COBIT or Scrum)
• Digital transformation sees best practices benefits more in terms of “improved business outcomes” as well as “reduced IT costs” and “improved agility in delivering IT services.”
• IT Transformation respondents ranked “improved business outcomes” below “reducing costs” and “improved agility in delivering services
One concept that the research bore out: technology and transformation must go together. For IT to evolve and become a partner, it must constantly address the needs of the business. For the business to evolve it must believe that IT organizations are more than just experts in technology, but business professionals as well.
Successful Transformation Always Starts with the Data
Analytics and metrics are great outputs for decision-making, but the basis of the decisions still requires quality data. The costs, risks and possible negative impact to the business are too large to take a chance on making a decisions based on poor data or inaccurate data.
Of the leaders surveyed, 35% stated Data Quality Management was a critical technology associated with their current or future transformation initiative and 32% responded that Data Integration was a critical technology.
When asked about the technologies used and needed to drive transformation the top uses cases were:
Top analytics and automation priorities:
• Enhanced workflow automation
• Analytics for IT governance
• Analytics for application/infrastructure optimization
• Configuration automation
Top business analytics and visualization priorities:
• Analytics on business outcomes (revenue/process/usage)
• IT financial planning analytics
• Analytics for ITSM efficiencies
• Executive dashboard for IT/business communication
Blazent’s Role in Transformation
The bottom line is that either Transformation requires quality data—complete, accurate and timely. Blazent’s robust and scalable platform delivers actionable analytics in near real-time. Our solution not only includes out-of-the-box analytics but also simple-to-configure dashboards that can be utilized by various personas across a company. The Blazent solution is designed from the ground up to handle the speed, complexity and diversity of data sources available today.
Conclusion
While the research that Dennis presented in his webinar was compelling, it is, as he noted, just a starting point. It will constantly be evaluated and refined, but it’s important to consider these numbers as you design your data architecture and practices.
I encourage you to listen to a full replay as soon as you can.